It was to the same railway station as that at which they had parted from
their guardian and been handed over to Mr Merryboy years before that
Bobby Frog now drove. The train was not due for half an hour.
"Tim," said Bob after they had walked up and down the platform for about
five minutes, "how slowly time seems to fly when one's in a hurry!"
"Doesn't it?" assented Tim, "crawls like a snail."
"Tim," said Bob, after ten minutes had elapsed, "what a difficult thing
it is to wait patiently when one's anxious!"
"Isn't it!" assented Tim, "so hard to keep from fretting and stamping."
"Tim," said Bob, after twenty minutes had passed, "I wonder if the two
or three dozen people on this platform are all as uncomfortably
impatient as I am."
"Perhaps they are," said Tim, "but certainly possessed of more power to
restrain themselves."
"Tim," said Bob, after the lapse of five-and-twenty minutes, "did you
ever hear of such a long half-hour since you were born?"
"Never," replied the sympathetic Tim, "except once long ago when I was
starving, and stood for about that length of time in front of a
confectioner's window till I nearly collapsed and had to run away at
last for fear I should smash in the glass and feed."
"Tim, I'll take a look round and see that the bays are all right."
"You've done that four times already, Bob."
"Well, I'll do it five times, Tim. There's luck, you know, in odd
numbers."
There was a sharpish curve on the line close to the station. While Bob
Frog was away the train, being five minutes before its time, came
thundering round the curve and rushed alongside the platform.
Bob ran back of course and stood vainly trying to see the people in each
carriage as it went past.
"Oh! _what_ a sweet eager face!" exclaimed Tim, gazing after a young
girl who had thrust her head out of a first-class carriage.
"Let alone sweet faces, Tim--this way. The third classes are all
behind."
By this time the train had stopped, and great was the commotion as
friends and relatives met or said good-bye hurriedly, and bustled into
and out of the carriages--commotion which was increased by the cheering
of a fresh band of rescued waifs going to new homes in the west, and the
hissing of the safety valve which took it into its head at that
inconvenient moment to let off superfluous steam. Some of the people
rushing about on that platform and jostling each other would have been
the better for safety valves! poor Bobby Frog was one of these.
"Not there!" he exclaimed despairingly, as he looked into the last
carriage of the train.
"Impossible," said Tim, "we've only missed them; walk back."
They went back, looking eagerly into carriage after carriage--Bob even
glancing under the seats in a sort of wild hope that his mother might be
hiding there, but no one resembling Mrs Frog was to be seen.
A commotion at the front part of the train, more pronounced than the
general hubbub, attracted their attention.
"Oh! where is he--where is he?" cried a female voice, which was followed
up by the female herself, a respectable elderly woman, who went about
the platform scattering people right and left in a fit of temporary
insanity, "where is my Bobby, where _is_ he, I say? Oh! _why_ won't
people git out o' my way? _Git_ out o' the way," (shoving a sluggish
man forcibly), "where are you, Bobby? Bo-o-o-o-o-by!"
It was Mrs Frog! Bob saw her, but did not move. His heart was in his
throat! He _could_ not move. As he afterwards said, he was struck all
of a heap, and could only stand and gaze with his hands clasped.
"Out o' the _way_, young man!" cried Mrs Frog, brushing indignantly
past him, in one of her erratic bursts. "Oh! Bobby--where _has_ that
boy gone to?"
"Mother!" gasped Bob.
"Who said that?" cried Mrs Frog, turning round with a sharp look, as if
prepared to retort "you're another" on the shortest notice.
"Mother!" again said Bob, unclasping his hands and holding them out.
Mrs Frog had hitherto, regardless of the well-known effect of time,
kept staring at heads on the level which Bobby's had reached when he
left home. She now looked up with a startled expression.
"Can it--is it--oh! Bo--" she got no further, but sprang forward and
was caught and fervently clasped in the arms of her son.
Tim fluttered round them, blowing his nose violently though quite free
from cold in the head--which complaint, indeed, is not common in those
regions.
Hetty, who had lost her mother in the crowd, now ran forward with Matty.
Bob saw them, let go his mother, and received one in each arm--
squeezing them both at once to his capacious bosom.
Mrs Frog might have fallen, though that was not probable, but Tim made
sure of her by holding out a hand which the good woman grasped, and laid
her head on his breast, quite willing to make use of him as a convenient
post to lean against, while she observed the meeting of the young people
with a contented smile.
Tim observed that meeting too, but with very different feelings, for the
"sweet eager face" that he had seen in the first-class carriage belonged
to Hetty! Long-continued love to human souls had given to her face a
sweetness--and sympathy with human spirits and bodies in the depths of
poverty, sorrow, and deep despair had invested it with a pitiful
tenderness and refinement--which one looks for more naturally among the
innocent in the higher ranks of life.
Poor Tim gazed unutterably, and his heart went on in such a way that
even Mrs Frog's attention was arrested. Looking up, she asked if he
was took bad.
"Oh! dear no. By no means," said Tim, quickly.
"You're tremblin' so," she returned, "an' it ain't cold--but your
colour's all right. I suppose it's the natur' o' you Canadians. But
only to think that my Bobby," she added, quitting her leaning-post, and
again seizing her son, "that my Bobby should 'ave grow'd up, an' his
poor mother knowed nothink about it! I can't believe my eyes--it ain't
like Bobby a bit, yet some'ow I _know_ it's 'im! Why, you've grow'd
into a gentleman, you 'ave."
"And you have grown into a flatterer," said Bob, with a laugh. "But
come, mother, this way; I've brought the wagon for you. Look after the
luggage, Tim--Oh! I forgot. This is Tim, Hetty--Tim Lumpy. You
remember, you used to see us playing together when we were city Arabs."
Hetty looked at Tim, and, remembering Bobby's strong love for jesting,
did not believe him. She smiled, however, and bowed to the tall
good-looking youth, who seemed unaccountably shy and confused as he went
off to look after the luggage.
"Here is the wagon; come along," said Bob, leading his mother out of the
station.
"The waggin, boy; I don't see no waggin."
"Why, there, with the pair of bay horses."
"You don't mean the carridge by the fence, do you?"
"Well, yes, only we call them wagons here."
"An' you calls the 'osses _bay_ 'osses, do you?"
"Well now, _I_ would call 'em beautiful 'osses, but I suppose bay means
the same thing here. You've got strange ways in Canada."
"Yes, mother, and pleasant ways too, as I hope you shall find out ere
long. Get in, now. Take care! Now then, Hetty--come, Matty. How
difficult to believe that such a strapping young thing can be the
squalling Matty I left in London!"
Matty laughed as she got in, by way of reply, for she did not yet quite
believe in her big brother.
"Do you drive, Tim; I'll stay inside," said Bob.
In another moment the spanking bays were whirling the wagon over the
road to Brankly Farm at the rate of ten miles an hour.
Need it be said that the amiable Merryboys did not fail of their duty on
that occasion? That Hetty and Matty took violently to brown-eyed Martha
at first sight, having heard all about her from Bob long ago--as she of
them; that Mrs Merryboy was, we may say, one glowing beam of
hospitality; that Mrs Frog was, so to speak, one blazing
personification of amazement, which threatened to become chronic--there
was so much that was contrary to previous experience and she was so slow
to take it in; that Mr Merryboy became noisier than ever, and that,
what between his stick and his legs, to say nothing of his voice, he
managed to create in one day hubbub enough to last ten families for a
fortnight; that the domestics and the dogs were sympathetically joyful;
that even the kitten gave unmistakeable evidences of unusual hilarity--
though some attributed the effect to surreptitiously-obtained cream;
and, finally, that old granny became something like a Chinese image in
the matter of nodding and gazing and smirking and wrinkling, so that
there seemed some danger of her terminating her career in a gush of
universal philanthropy--need all this be said, we ask? We think not;
therefore we won't say it.
But it was not till Bob Frog got his mother all to himself, under the
trees, near the waterfall, down by the river that drove the still
unmended saw-mill, that they had real and satisfactory communion. It
would have been interesting to have listened to these two--with memories
and sympathies and feelings towards the Saviour of sinners so closely
intertwined, yet with knowledge and intellectual powers in many respects
so far apart. But we may not intrude too closely.
Towards the end of their walk, Bob touched on a subject which had been
uppermost in the minds of both all the time, but from which they had
shrunk equally, the one being afraid to ask, the other disinclined to
tell.
"Mother," said Bob, at last, "what about father?"
"Ah! Bobby," replied Mrs Frog, beginning to weep, gently, "I know'd ye
would come to that--you was always so fond of 'im, an' he was so fond o'
you too, indeed--"
"I know it, mother," interrupted Bob, "but have you never heard of him?"
"Never. I might 'ave, p'r'aps, if he'd bin took an' tried under his own
name, but you know he had so many aliases, an' the old 'ouse we used to
live in we was obliged to quit, so p'r'aps he tried to find us and
couldn't."
"May God help him--dear father!" said the son in a low sad voice.
"I'd never 'ave left 'im, Bobby, if he 'adn't left me. You know that.
An' if I thought he was alive and know'd w'ere he was, I'd go back to
'im yet, but--"
The subject was dropped here, for the new mill came suddenly into view,
and Bob was glad to draw his mother's attention to it.
"See, we were mending that just before we got the news you were so near
us. Come, I'll show it to you. Tim Lumpy and I made it all by
ourselves, and I think you'll call it a first-class article. By the
way, how came you to travel first-class?"
"Oh! that's all along of Sir Richard Brandon. He's sitch a liberal
gentleman, an' said that as it was by his advice we were goin' to
Canada, he would pay our expenses; and he's so grand that he never
remembered there was any other class but first, when he took the
tickets, an' when he was show'd what he'd done he laughed an' said he
wouldn't alter it, an' we must go all the way first-class. He's a
strange man, but a good 'un!"
By this time they had reached the platform of the damaged saw-mill, and
Bob pointed out, with elaborate care, the details of the mill in all its
minute particulars, commenting specially on the fact that most of the
telling improvements on it were due to the fertile brain and inventive
genius of Tim Lumpy. He also explained the different kinds of saws--the
ripping saw, and the cross-cut saw, and the circular saw, and the
eccentric saw--just as if his mother were an embryo mill-wright, for he
_felt_ that she took a deep interest in it all, and Mrs Frog listened
with the profound attention of a civil engineer, and remarked on
everything with such comments as--oh! indeed! ah! well now! ain't it
wonderful? amazin'! an' you made it all too! Oh! Bobby!--and other
more or less appropriate phrases.
On quitting the mill to return to the house they saw a couple of figures
walking down another avenue, so absorbed in conversation that they did
not at first observe Bob and his mother, or take note of the fact that
Matty, being a bouncing girl, had gone after butterflies or some such
child-alluring insects.
It was Tim Lumpy and Hetty Frog.
And no wonder that they were absorbed, for was not their conversation on
subjects of the profoundest interest to both?--George Yard, Whitechapel,
Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and the Sailor's Home, and the Rests,
and all the other agencies for rescuing poor souls in monstrous London,
and the teachers and school companions whom they had known there and
never could forget! No wonder, we say, that these two were absorbed
while comparing notes, and still less wonder that they were even more
deeply absorbed when they got upon the theme of Bobby Frog--so much
loved, nay, almost worshipped, by both.
At last they observed Mrs Frog's scarlet shawl--which was very
conspicuous--and her son, and tried to look unconscious, and wondered
with quite needless surprise where Matty could have gone to.
Bobby Frog, being a sharp youth, noted these things, but made no comment
to any one, for the air of Canada had, somehow, invested this waif with
wonderful delicacy of feeling.
Although Bob and his mother left off talking of Ned Frog somewhat
abruptly, as well as sorrowfully, it does not follow that we are bound
to do the same. On the contrary, we now ask the reader to leave Brankly
Farm rather abruptly, and return to London for the purpose of paying Ned
a visit.